Space exploration has been a rather popular theme for gaming lately, with titles such as No Man’s Sky and Star Citizen taking the headlines of impressive indie and AAA games on the market. But some folks want to create more humble, yet still exhilarating experiences. With VR making its way into more people’s homes, it’s time to see if The Collider 2 could be the first indie smash hit of the year within sci-fi gaming.
The Collider 2 is the sequel to its highly successful predecessor, The Collider. This sequel builds upon the original in many aspects to create a bolder and more sustainable game. The original Collider had a simplistic yet attention-grabbing art style, both elegant and entertaining gameplay, and high replay value that kept gamers coming back for more.
The Collider 2 is a huge step forward in terms of visual presentation and design while also keeping to the roots of the original game. Everything looks and sounds superior in aesthetic quality, representing a bigger budget and more interesting design choices. Gameplay keeps to the same manner as before, where players are in control of a lonesome spacecraft and their objectives revolve around navigating through a giant starship littered with obstacles, enemies, and even big fights with giant robotic aliens.
You are encouraged to go as fast as you can with a light speed boost, while keeping high reflexes and raw determination in order to progress through rather challenging missions as the game expands. You can buy upgrades and new star ships to play with in the main game and in the online survival mode. This sounds like a winning formula for a game. At least, for the first hour, I thought so. Then it sadly became apparent that The Collider 2 may have “over-jumped it” without really putting any thought or substance into the actual game.
There are a few issues I have with this title; mainly, the rather poor and dull level design. Players are constantly confined in rather unimaginative, long-winded tracks performing the same actions over and over, all with little variation. Mission layouts often feel messy and cluttered, with a sense of lazy design that soon becomes awkward to traverse through unless you have the reflexes of a god.
Considering you can’t slow your starship down, even for a second, this makes simple maneuvers such as moving from one side of the screen to the other in a short space of time impossible. It also doesn’t help that many of the levels are overly cluttered, even at the early stages of the game. Sadly, you’re never brought into the game gently and, within the first few missions, you can see the game will throw everything at you without a proper difficulty curve. With a total lack of checkpoints, the longer missions will drag on as well.
This doesn’t help but, rather, makes The Collider 2 an annoying game of tedious trial and error. Whereas a game like Dark Souls gives you time to learn from your mistakes and is fair in terms of the mechanics it presents, The Collider 2 just feels random, unwilling to let you learn, all the while feeling rather restrictive in movement. The game makes it clear it wants you to fail, repeat, and progress slowly.
The Collider 2 is also massively repetitive as mission objectives are repeated over and over with very little variation between them. It’s either a speed run, destroy red cubes, or collect blue spears. The total length of the game is pretty sustainable but, when you notice the content within is repeated so much by the second act of The Collider 2, it just becomes mind-numbingly dull. The only element that broke up the tedious flow was the boss battles. These were a highlight compared to most of the game and felt like a well deserved spectacle.
What annoyed me the most was how the upgrade system, for the most part, felt extremely ineffective. I improved several of my upgrades, including shields and, strangely enough, they still had the same impact as never upgrading them in the first place. It’s only the highest ranking ships you buy that present the better defenses when fully maxed out. But, by this stage, the game is pretty much done and dusted or you’re just bored of it.
The survival mode itself presents very little else from the main campaign, aside from a leader board and a separate list of rewards that can be used in the main game. This does hold one issue, as Survival mode does make it fairly easy to earn major funds very quickly, even if you do reasonably well. It feels a little unbalanced as you can just repeat the same level provided and, by doing a little better or upping your multiplier by boosting it, you’ll be laughing to the bank and buying those useless upgrades within an hour or so.
The Collider 2 is sadly filled with repetitive gameplay, issues with difficulty, and just plain old boring progression that gets old too fast. I’d imagine that with VR, it’s more of an engaging experience but, to be fair, this game would still harbor the same problems with or without the headset. I did enjoy the game in very small doses and, with some tweaking in managing the difficulty curve and presenting bigger, more interesting levels, I believe the game could actually be a lot better. But as it stands, it’s just a dull, clunky, space-themed racing game. You can have more fun with the first game, or even Space Megaforce. Go check that game out. It’s awesome.
A review code for The Collider 2 was provided by Shortbreak Studios for the purpose of this review